Back in 2013 when we started to plan how and what to decorate and agreeing what should be in and what should be out, a shoe wardrobe was very much on my wish list. But it was deemed not to be, although I secretly thought I'd always manage to sneak it back in again somehow. You see, I do like a nice pair of shoes or two, and I may well have accumulated more than the usual number of pairs...

In my mind I'd have a wardrobe in the spare bedroom dedicated to shoes. It would have pull out racks with shoe trees on so it'd be very easy to decide which shoes to wear, and be easy to get to them too.

I'd spotted some racks in IKEA which did just that, and seriously coveted them. However, because the decorating on our middle floor - where the spare room is, didn't take place until earlier this year the shoe wardrobe was put on hold and during that time many of my shoes were stored in a large cardboard box in the conservatory. Occasionally you'd find me in the box head first, searching frantically for the pair of shoes I wanted to wear, that I was sure was in this box. Somewhere...

As we got around to decorating the spare room I learnt that IKEA had stopped doing my dream shoe storage solutions, so further negotiations were needed to secure somewhere suitable to store them. The Expedit units were the answer, our solution was to combine a 2x2 unit and a 4x2 unit on each side of the room.

A deal was struck.

One IKEA unit primarily for record storage and another IKEA unit of the same size primarily for shoe storage. Yay. I'll let you work out which of us were claiming which unit...

Further negotiations were entered which resulted in MOH putting forward a good case for some storage in the shoe unit. Three cupboards I was assured would be enough. The rest was mine. This is how it worked out.

I'll admit it's not quite what I imagined, but it's clean, functional and looks good. And let's face it it's way better than rummaging in a large cardboard box!

With the help of some pretty labels I can now easily find the shoes I want.

And yes the top right cupboard also has a pilates circle in and isn't so organised as the rest of the unit. But, hey it's got to go somewhere and boots were slightly trickier to fit in tidily. There are at least four pairs of knee length boots in there - and yes, I need all of them!

Don't ask me how many pairs I have, I still didn't count them. But at least now it's much easier to do that, if I wanted too!